


learn to live right

by andreaphobia



Category: Free!
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Or at least some of them, Post-Fight, Second Chances, Time heals all wounds, Trying to Forget, Trying to remember, Waiting, a struggle with depression, regretting mistakes, wanting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-11
Updated: 2018-11-11
Packaged: 2019-08-22 00:22:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16587128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andreaphobia/pseuds/andreaphobia
Summary: Sometimes it takes a little while to figure out what you want. Or: the story of the longest year in Makoto's life.





	learn to live right

**Author's Note:**

> A gift for MakoHaru friends. :D Please enjoy!
> 
> Soundtrack for this fic: [Lucy Rose's 'Shiver'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o84y-5-cO0), which is a great song with a great video.
> 
> Many thanks to [Rosaria](http://archiveofourown.org/users/benicemurphy) for helping me sanity check this. :-*

 

 

Any minute now the train would be there, and he still hadn’t thought of something to say.

Earlier that morning, at half past six, the twins were still asleep, sparing him from the guilt trip of the century. His parents had come to the door, though, to see him off.

Saying goodbye to them had taken hardly any time at all. His mother had not cried noisily or showily as she stood there, framed by the entrance to his childhood home, twisting her hands together fretfully. She had only smiled, and any tears she shed collected for a moment in the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes like dew. When at last they overflowed, they raced each other down her cheeks, leaving wet rivulets along her laugh lines that gleamed in the first light of dawn.

In contrast, his father was stoic. He had hugged Makoto and asked, again, if he was sure he didn’t need them to take him to the station.

To this he’d said: yes, he was sure. Haru was coming to see him off, after all.

He noticed the look they exchanged, then, though he pretended not to. His parents were no fools; they had to have noticed that there was something a touch off about the two of them. But on some level it didn’t matter, and anyway he’d learned by now not to meddle where it wasn’t needed. All he knew was this: that Haru was special, in a way that he could not precisely articulate but instead _felt_ , unrestrainedly and without reservations. And that was all he’d ever needed, at least, up till the day when Haru had turned his back on Makoto, and run pell-mell down the hill to escape him—up till the day when Makoto had bared it all, put all of himself out there and it still hadn’t been enough. He wouldn’t dare to hope for more.

(He would take what he could get.)

He’d found Haru waiting for him just outside the gate, hands shoved into his pockets, his head tucked down into his hoodie to ward off the cold. He had glanced up as Makoto approached but something about the distant look in his eyes forbade a greeting. He seemed to look right through Makoto, seeing not the boy with his awkward hunched shoulders and his duffel bag but the wooden fence behind it, carrying his mother’s planters heavy with greenery. They hardly spoke on the way there, but Makoto didn’t mind much. It was par for the course, a bright sun-spot of familiarity in a sea of change.

Now, newborn sunlight cast long shadows across the station platform, painting the world a particular shade of early-morning gray that made him shiver to look at it. Again, Haru was not looking at him. His eyes wandered sluggishly, lingering on the empty plastic chairs sitting in a line by the recycling bin and the blinking light on the vending machine, like there were answers to be found there. He acted as though he believed he was still dreaming; as though there was a thin film between himself and the rest of the world which he could not quite break through. He held himself tensely where he stood, every once in a while opening his hands as if to let his fingers breathe, only to make a fist again.

Somehow, Makoto had imagined that when this moment finally came, he’d do better than this. That one way or another, the right words would emerge from the troubled mire of his mind, solving everything that had gone wrong. But he couldn’t think of anything clever, nor anything that wasn’t tainted with desperation. The night before he had lain in bed, but could not sleep. All his thoughts chased each other round in a head that was already crowded with his fears until they crystallized into a single word—the one thing that he could not do with a duffel bag in one hand and a train ticket in the other— _stay_. Don’t go.

The worst part of it all was the idea that it made no difference. Yes, the future was unknowable, but there was one thing he could be sure of: you couldn’t drag someone kicking and screaming into it, not if they didn’t want to go. He couldn’t make things right, not when he wasn’t wanted or needed, so he was helpless.

This was all he could think to do.

Nothing would change if they stood still.

A shadow passed over his face, and he looked up in search of its source. Papery wingbeats carried the bird that had cast it higher and higher into the colorless sky, away from where they stood on the station platform, ostensibly together yet distinctly apart, weighed down by words that neither of them could say.

Then it was time. Rails shrieked as the train pulled into the station, slowing, slowing, then lurching to a stop with a great, sibilant gasp. It was time, and he knew that his last chance was slipping away.

“Well—” he’d said aloud, hating the way that Haru’s face changed at the sound of his voice, a broken window through which brief flashes of emotion incandesced. Panic bled into naked anguish, and his lower lip trembled until it was stilled by his teeth. He had never seen Haru so honest, and at the same time thought that he could have gone the rest of his life without it. “I guess this is goodbye, huh?”

He smiled but Haru did not see it; his eyes were frantic, searching the ground as if he’d dropped what he wanted to say. In the end he said nothing at all and Makoto swallowed around the lump that had formed in his throat. There was no more time so he said, “Take care,” and hoped that his voice only shook in his imagination; that his smile looked half again as natural as it felt.

Later he would not be able to remember how he’d managed to turn and walk away, or how he’d boarded the train or found his seat. All he remembered was watching from the window as the figure of Haru grew smaller and smaller—not waving, only watching, until finally even the shape of him was snuffed from view and he was gone.

 

 

The first week was the hardest.

In the daytime he could almost believe that he was whole. On his first Sunday in Tokyo, breakfast was burned and he nearly set off the building’s fire alarm. The acrid stench of smoke permeated the flat, and for a week all meals had to be taken on the balcony, a sad selection of fast food in greasy paper bags and convenience store bentos picked apart with disposable chopsticks. The boxes piled up throughout the apartment made for decent furniture, and he kept telling himself that he’d unpack them tomorrow—someday—soon enough. He took the train to class and back, and walked whenever the opportunity presented itself, floating wraithlike through crowds, set apart by walls of his own imagining. All these little acts of living, or at least going through the motions, comforted him for what they were worth.

And then in the evenings—when the sun went down and cast the longest shadow over the earth, when being alone turned to loneliness and night was crowned king—it became clear that he was anything but fine. How he coped varied by the day. Some nights he would fill up the bathtub and then sit on the floor beside it, leaning over the edge to trail his fingertips in the water, just because it felt nice. Other times, he lay comatose in bed, so apathetic to the world that he could not even rouse himself to turn out the lights.

He could not understand why it hurt so much, why the pain was so huge and relentless and why he could not, for the life of him, shake himself out of it. It wasn’t fair, either, because at least if it had shown as a scar—the place where a part of himself had been surgically, clinically removed—then maybe he could’ve accepted it, the bookend to another chapter in the history of his life. But when the grief had passed through Makoto and taken everything with it, it had not left a mark. Nothing tangible remained.

In some ways he was glad that he had been the one to leave home, for there was nowhere he could go that didn’t remind him. The town was made of memories; every footstep down the stairs, every mossy drain and puddle, every place where the red paint had splintered or faded on the side of a torii gate was a place that they had been, too. The view from the cracked stone brick wall that overlooked the inlet where waves kissed the land, sand and grit scraping between his toes and the hysteria of the gulls—each and every one of these things was an image engraved upon the heart, more permanent than any memory.

It had been a place where they could be together, freely—or so he had thought.

Now, more often than not, he found himself staying indoors, thinking about trying not to think. His mind crept sullenly through the hallways of memory, peeking into boxes and then recoiling, each time, at the startling newness of pain. He would stand in the shower for long enough that his fingers shriveled up, water pouring down over his head and his ears and his back, a shroud to keep out the world. His body was not his own; a foreign mass of meat and muscle and bone, it sat apart from him as he looked down on it from above. And each time he breathed, pieces of him cracked off and fell away to go spiraling down the drain pipes, until he felt that he could no longer stand.

It was hard to see straight in the steam and sodden heat, and maybe it would have been even worse if he cried, but he did not—he _could_ not. Water was everywhere except where it was needed the most, and he could not locate the part of him that was capable of producing those feelings in the chaos of all his thoughts. It was too raw to be made sense of; it was an ache beyond imagining. He could only hope that maybe, given enough time, or with enough distance, maybe the day would come that he would remember how to piece himself back together, until the inside matched the outside, perfect and whole again.

 

 

And then, on the afternoon of a particular Wednesday two months after he’d left Haru standing on the platform at Iwatobi station, he had an epiphany.

The thing was—he’d met a girl.

She wasn’t the first and would not be the last, but her persistence was what set her apart. And she had a habit of asking questions that were none of her business.

She wanted him to call her Aya; she was a pretty girl, with an equally pretty name. Looking at her sparked nothing in Makoto except the dubious notion that he ought to like her, and the absolute conviction that he didn’t. Truthfully, it had been hard enough for him to even reach this point. Weeks upon weeks had passed before he’d managed to leave the house for anything besides class, before he could claim to have people he called friends, or even to want them at all. Sure, it was the done thing, these grand expressions of normalcy, but to him they were borderline unbearable. It was all he could do to keep it together.

So, as was bound to happen, he met a girl. She wore her hair in braids, and had a fat white cat named Poki that seemed to spend most of its life asleep. Makoto liked to see pictures of it—they brought to mind birdsong at dawn, the way sunlight could bleach an old staircase startlingly white, and how it felt to seize a warm, wet palm in his own, and pull. She joined the after-school book club, which he was a member of, and followed him to the station in the evenings after they had finished convening.

In a strangely detached way, he understood that she wanted to be friends, or more. It did not surprise him, then, as they were en route to the station one evening, with the twilight of spring teasing dusty heat through the sky, when she said to him with no preamble whatsoever—You have someone you like, don’t you?

It didn’t sound like a question so he opted for the coward’s route of silence, though this didn’t matter anyway. The same persistence that led her to appropriate the seat next to him in their lectures whenever she could also meant that she could carry the conversation alone, if she had to. What is she like? she wondered aloud, her gaze tilted upwards, watching clouds melt across the sky. She walked with her hands tucked neatly behind her back, taking dainty little steps that made him feel awful and graceless. Is she a swimmer, like you?

It was funny how one word could hold so much meaning, could recall so many little things he’d thought he’d managed to seal away. Warm afternoons by the pool, a dive so sleek that it barely caused a ripple, wiggling his toes on a starting board warmed by the sun and a boy who only swam free—

Yes, he’d said without thinking, and saw her face change as though she’d been slapped. It only lasted a moment, however; she caught herself, steadied the rhythm of her footsteps, and continued on, as though nothing had happened.

Tell me about her, she’d said softly, and he could not refuse. He breathed in sharply through his nose, his thoughts all in a fog. He did not think of Haru. Not his dive, not the figure he cut through the water, not his slender hands nor the pinched hollows of his wrist, not the clean lines of his back or the ticklish spot on the inside of his knee, not the eyes that he could have drowned in every day nor the way he smiled when he thought no one was looking. Not how he used to run in the nighttime when he needed to think, nor how he cooked his own breakfast every morning because nothing else would do—and least of all how he would stare out the window in class and Makoto always knew what he was thinking, because _oh_ they knew each other so well.

She’s... beautiful, was all he could manage, trite as it sounded.

For the longest time the girl said nothing. They walked on; he followed her lead, taking clumsy steps in the wake of her delicate little ones. When he looked at her again he saw that her eyes were filled with tears, and for a moment he was almost jealous—jealous that she could feel that way, when he didn’t know how to, himself. Then she turned her face away with an audible sniff, hiding it from him as though ashamed of her own honesty.

She’s lucky, she had said.

No, said Makoto. I am. And he had never meant anything more.

That night was the first time he’d messaged Haru, since the day he’d left. The last time, as he noted when he scrolled up, had been nearly six months prior. Which only made sense—it had never really been necessary to message each other before, after all. What was the point, when Haru was always by his side?

Squinting in the dark (for he’d forgotten to turn on the lights again), fingers hesitating over the keys, he typed out:

 _I want to talk about what happened with us_.

After he finished, he was immediately paralyzed by doubt. It was too much, far too soon. He could not do it. Certainly, it wasn’t as though they’d had a second fight, but they didn’t need to; after all, the first had never been resolved. He waffled for a while longer, and then ended up saving it into his drafts, unable to hit send. _Always meddling_ —but he’d moved past that now, he knew better. (He’d even put a seven-hour train ride between them to be sure it wouldn’t happen again.)

Nearly half an hour passed while he puzzled over how to word the thing he wanted to say, before he finally settled on a single, simple fact:

 _Today a girl asked me if I have anyone I like_.

It took two days for a reply to come back—some habits, he supposed, never changed. He was in class when the message arrived, and nearly jumped out of his seat in shock when he saw the sender. His friends shushed him humorously but he barely noticed. He opened it with shaking hands and read, simply, this:

_i see_

Two words, twice Haru’s normal word economy. It had been long enough now that Makoto was no longer sure, but he had the vaguest sense that there was a question buried in there somewhere. He was doubly uncertain of how to answer it, yet he’d had enough of regretting inaction. He sent back:

 _I told her I was taken_.

Perhaps that would be enough for Haru to understand, and perhaps it wouldn’t. Regardless, he was comforted by the thought that Haru was out there somewhere—living his life, continuing to exist. And it opened the dialogue that had been cut prematurely short on that drab morning in March, when he had told Haru to simply _take care_ , as though that was any kind of proper goodbye. So it came to be that he began to send Haru the occasional message—not too often, and not too much, but just whenever the mood struck him, as it often did after the sun went down.

For his part, Haru texted back with the austerity of a man who was saving his words for a rainy day. _hello_ , _no_ , _maybe_ , _tired_ , _goodnight_ —each word, Makoto liked to think, carefully chosen for maximum impact, but probably not. He spoke little of life in Iwatobi, although once in a while there were pictures, which Makoto saved, studying hungrily as though an adequate substitute for knowing him. Sometimes he could not even tell what a photograph was supposed to mean but he pretended to; he was afraid of asking questions that took more than one word to answer, because then Haru wouldn’t talk at all.

Once, Haru sent a picture that didn’t seem to be taken by him at all. It was out of focus, the colors all melting together and someone’s thumb covering half the lens but there was a blob in the corner that looked like it might be a person with dark hair, if you squinted just right.

Makoto liked to think that this was an image of Haru. Somehow, in the recesses of his mind, it warped into a moment that retained the intimacy they had once shared. It was a secret stolen glimpse; a view of Haru that he might have once had, from a careless sideways glance.

He could not remember when he had stopped looking for Haru, out of the corner of his eye. He could not remember exactly how it had come to be like this, everything in pieces, with him longing endlessly for the day when they would be put back together. He poured out his feelings to no one, writing long messages that piled up in a folder, all unsent, until he was left with nothing but the dregs of his own emotions, and still could not be honest with himself.

But he could not, _would_ not burden Haru with any of it, and so the messages he sent contained nothing but trivialities; nothing of importance. He could not make himself say anything else. And each time a chance reply came back, the ‘new message’ light blinking on his phone became his lifeline—a place to go when it all became too much, a reminder of things he’d once had.

 

 

Later that summer, he discovered that he could no longer make out the words on the blackboards in his lectures. The biggest ones, yes—those still held their shape, but the smaller they got, the less sense they made, until finally they were nothing more than an illegible smear.

It was strange to realize that he had no idea when it had started, when his world had grown too cloudy to be understood. Perhaps he had just grown acclimated to a world out of focus. The pain became a part of him, in the same way that he wore his shoes long after they started pinching, until the soles were nearly coming off.

When it got bad enough he went to the optician’s for a new prescription, which ended up giving him headaches. Funny how seeing clearly only made him feel worse. The next time he looked at the blackboard he could see it with a clarity that was almost startling; all the big words and little words made out in chalk, their outlines obscuring the words of yesterday, and he suddenly realized that those chalk-dust shadows were traces of things that he could never get back.

By and large, his memories went the same way. He recalled with relative ease the biggest things—events of great import and their general outlines, but the little things were harder, and each time he tried they seemed to grow more imprecise, the details abraded the way a sculpture weathers with time. Had Haru been walking on his left or his right, on the day when he’d left? Had he smiled at all, or had he only worn the serious expression he reserved for things of significance? Most frighteningly, he could not even summon up an image of himself from that day; his own face was a blur, his hands and arms and body a blur, all the edges gone soft and indistinct like a pebble in river water.

Everything faded with time, and there was probably a lesson in there somewhere, if he could only see it without distortion. He had buried a part of himself so deep that he’d thought it lost, and when he had finally unearthed it again, he was shocked at what he’d found. Was it healthy, the way they had lived? Or had they held each other back, too afraid to fly? He didn’t know, all of these concepts were too new for him to grasp all at once, but on those nights when he only had textbooks for company, it ate at him.

(Maybe he’d walked alongside Haru for so long that now neither of them knew how to walk alone.)

Each time he thought he might be getting better, he relapsed. Spring had offered false optimism, the hope of new beginnings falling flat. Summer had been intolerable. He could not walk past a body of water without remembering, and always found himself having to throw away half of his popsicle, untouched.

Fall was slightly better, filled of bracing sensations. The crunch of dry leaves and twigs underfoot, brisk reds and golds filling his vision and the vaguely sickly-sweet smell of rotting foliage all served to take him out of himself, making him forget—if only for a moment—the sensation of drowning.

Winter, on the other hand, was worst of all. The cold leached all feeling from his fingers and he could not even distract himself with the fluctuations of the weather. The skies were gray, always, the sunlight without warmth, and everything was brittle, precariously balanced: the ice which had settled in leaves over the pond in the park, the frost which webbed the window panes, and even the puddles did not have the courtesy to stay wet, but solidified into sheets that threatened broken bones, or worse.

One day he woke up, cold in a bed where he had kicked off all the blankets, and as he lay there shivering it occurred to him that he did not even know Haru’s voice. When he realized he had already lost that much, he began to spiral. The days withered and shrunk until the were all one day, the same day, which coiled round and round to repeat itself in an infernal loop. He thought that he would have preferred the freshness of pain if it would’ve helped him remember; he would rather have repeated that day over and over again, than to lose it forever. He wanted to freeze himself in time, in stasis, to wake up when the winter was finally over—when he could believe that spring’s rebirth would return him to the past, where he could do things over, where he would get a chance to do things right.

 

 

Nothing could be that easy, though. Life didn’t offer do-overs—which was a pity, because he sure could have used one.

The changing seasons measured out all the hours that passed him by, and soon he was counting days to the end of the year. The windows were shut to keep out the chill, but he could still make out the sound of rain on the concrete sidewalks, a distant roar like the sea. It had been an unusually wet December, and that day was no different. The streets were deluged, and it was a sorry businessman indeed who found himself trapped outside without an umbrella. Sheets of water muddied the orange glow of the streetlamps and the trees outside his window swayed perilously under the weight of all that water.

He watched a variety show for a while with the volume turned down low, the laughter of the audience reduced to barely a murmur over the white noise of the downpour. He thought of messaging Haru, but could not think of what to say. A statement on the weather seemed too banal to be bothered with. Looking through his messages, he realized the last time Haru had sent him something was a week ago, and there had been nothing since. It was normal, he told himself; perhaps he had gotten busy.

Or perhaps he had finally tired of this half-hearted, tenuous connection, these long-forgotten feelings that still bound them together. When he thought this, panic began to rise in his throat. It was all he could do to keep breathing. He realized he was grinding his teeth and consciously forced his jaw to relax.

Even now, a year later, he could not find it in himself to let go. He opened a new message, addressed to no one in particular, and typed out slowly,

 _I wish you were here_.

The pointlessness of it was enough to wring a smile out of him, at least. He saved it into his drafts, and was about to toss his phone away across the couch when it buzzed, startling him into nearly dropping it.

The message was from Haru, and it read:

 _come downstairs_.

Makoto read it once, then again, comprehension only making landfall on the third attempt. It was impossible, of course—some kind of hallucination brought on by eating one too many burnt pieces of toast. (Although if there was anyone who wouldn’t mind standing out in this storm, he supposed it might be Haru.)

He told himself he was getting his hopes up for nothing, it probably wasn’t even meant for him. Probably meant for Nagisa or Rei’s eyes. They, after all, were still in Iwatobi, and he was not.

He told himself that it wouldn’t hurt to check.

Rain was streaming down the window too, obscuring what little he could see, but he thought he could—just barely—make out a figure standing isolated in the cone of light cast by the streetlamp across the road.

( _come downstairs_ , it had said.)

He could not remember locking the apartment door, or even putting on his shoes. He took the stairs three at a time, nearly knocking over a neighbor coming up the other way, all the way down to the ground floor, where he sprinted through the lobby and threw open the doors to skid out into the downpour.

It was bucketing down and the rain hit him hard, like a physical blow. It hammered across his shoulders and back, and he could hardly see. The walk sign was off but he splashed across the street anyway, coming to the place where Haru was waiting for him.

Then Haru lifted his head. Water was dripping into his eyes and he said one word—”Makoto—”, just like that. It was barely audible over the rain but it was his voice, _Haru's_ voice, and something came over him. Two more steps and he’d crashed into Haru bodily, nearly taking them both to the ground. They stumbled in lockstep, all arms and shaky limbs, grasping and slipping, trying to find purchase so as to never let go again. Makoto did not kiss him, but mashed their foreheads together so their faces were as close as they could get. Haru’s nose was shockingly cold against his cheek and they were absolutely drenched but it was fine, more than fine, Haru was here and he was real and Makoto had never felt better in his life.

Time passed; he wasn’t sure how long, but it was a while that they stood there like that, arms around each other, just holding on in the rain, blanketed by the sound of the ocean. At some point, though, he noticed Haru was shivering, and pulled back just enough to really look at him. Even with his hair plastered flat to his head and all his clothes soaked, he looked weirdly untouchable, like it was perfectly natural for him to be standing out in the middle of a monsoon, and Makoto’s chest grew tight.

“Haru, what are you—” He almost had to spit water out of his mouth, swipe it out of his eyes just to breathe. “ _Why_ are you here? How did you...”

His voice died in his throat. All this time, and he still couldn’t find the words. All of ten months and there was already something different about Haru, though he could not pinpoint exactly what it was. Had he grown? Or had he cut his hair differently? It killed him to think of Haru somewhere far away from him, growing and changing in ways that he could not see, even though that was precisely what he’d done himself.

Instead of answering him Haru said, “Let’s go inside,” and it was hard to disagree. Twenty minutes later Haru was fresh out of the shower, seated on the couch in borrowed sweatpants with a towel thrown over his head. They had spoken shockingly little in that time. Haru’s duffel bag, which Makoto supposed he should not have been surprised to discover was waterproof, was lying in a corner of his bedroom. Makoto himself had changed out of his wet clothes; he was pacing round and round in the kitchen with a kind of frenetic energy that he hadn’t felt in over a year, muttering to himself as he waited for the kettle to finish boiling. Every once in a while he would glance at Haru, but never directly and never for too long, as though he thought Haru might disappear if he did.

He didn’t understand anything that was happening, and said as much as he brought a mug of hot tea to Haru. He put the mug in Haru’s hands and their fingers brushed. Haru didn’t seem to mind this; he huffed a breath across the surface of the tea, stirring the cloud of steam, and then drank and set the mug aside. He took a deep breath.

Then he began to speak, more words than Makoto could ever remember him saying except maybe for that one terrible night beneath the fireworks—an entire year’s worth of words. He’d gotten Makoto’s address from his mother. Rei and Gou had helped him with what to say. He’d been staying in Tokyo for a week. He hadn’t had time to check his messages. He was... sorry, for everything he’d said—and at this, they both knew, without him needing to clarify, what he meant.

Makoto began pacing again unconsciously as he talked, wearing down the floor around the couch but he stopped when Haru held out his phone. He took another one of those minute sideways glances at Haru again, just long enough to take in his expression, which was solemn, perfectly serious.

He took Haru’s phone. There was a picture on it, and at first he couldn’t even understand what he was looking at, it was so small and poorly lit and half out of focus. He turned it sideways to get a better view and read, stumblingly:

_Notification of Admission: Athletics Program, Hidaka University_

in great big letters across the top.

Again, it did not seem to register until he had read it twice over. Haru watched him do this in silence. His face appeared impassive, but there was maybe something about his eyes that suggested otherwise; a hint of nervousness perhaps.

Makoto lowered the hand that held the phone. He looked askance at Haru, who simply shrugged.

“I decided what I wanted,” said Haru, quietly. “Just like you did.”

Makoto’s mind worked in slow motion. He felt delirious and part of him suspected he might still be asleep, but even his wildest dreams had never been so hopeful. His fingers went slack and the phone slipped from them, followed soon by the buckling of his knees; before he even knew it he had slumped to the floor before Haru, his forehead coming to rest against Haru’s legs. He could not think or breathe or even _be_ , and when he spoke even his voice came out in pieces.

“I waited for you, Haru. For so long... I didn’t ever think—”

“I know.” There was such a tenderness in Haru’s voice that his chest twinged again; he didn’t repeat himself but Makoto thought that he meant _I’m sorry_. “But I’m here now.”

Makoto dug his fingers into the loose terrycloth of the borrowed sweatpants. He took great gasping breaths as though mere oxygen was enough to soothe the pain in his chest, and his eyes were dry—but barely, just barely. He’d changed since then, it was true, but how could they know it would be enough? How could they be sure? He was still the same meddling fool, the same nuisance who just didn’t know when to stop—he hadn’t even managed to stop loving Haru, after all.

Haru began to pet his hair then, with slow, gentle strokes of his fingertips that mussed the damp strands to one side, soothing. In time he began to breathe again, his heart rate slowing, finding a rhythm with the motions of Haru’s hand.

“I’m sorry,” said Haru, again. His voice cracked and his hand went still for a moment, long enough for Makoto to reach up, lacing their fingers together.

His hand felt just like Makoto remembered. He squeezed it, and found it in himself to whisper back,

“Me too.”

It wasn’t often you got a second chance, but this time, he’d do things right.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are always appreciated!
> 
> You can find me on [Tumblr](http://andreaphobia.tumblr.com) and [Twitter](http://twitter.com/andreaphobia).


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